


reason comes (on the common tongue)

by illusorx



Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Childhood Friends, Friends to Lovers, Lust, M/M, Pining, Sexual Tension, Slow Burn, Smut, dreamnap roomates era
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-13 23:54:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28911897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/illusorx/pseuds/illusorx
Summary: The first time Clay sees Nick’s dick is accidental.
Relationships: Clay | Dream/Sapnap (Video Blogging RPF)
Comments: 72
Kudos: 467





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [samsungfridge](https://archiveofourown.org/users/samsungfridge/gifts).



The first time Clay sees Nick’s dick is accidental.

It's three in the afternoon, so Clay isn't particularly expecting Nick to be fresh out of the shower when he opens his bedroom door. He could have knocked, he supposes, but he can’t be blamed for the oversight.

He pushes the door open, ready to ask Nick about his plans for streaming later today, but Nick is standing in front of his dresser, towel-drying his hair with both hands. Clay’s eyes catch on the dark hair on Nick’s chest, and his words stick in his throat. Nick’s dick is soft, reaching out from the hair that grows between his legs. The skin of it is dark, especially so when contrasted with the pale skin of his inner thighs. The trunk of it swells out, curved and wide, and he’s _long,_ too. Clay feels his face burning, and his limbs feel heavy and frozen in place. Nick pulls the towel away from his face, and Clay feels the moment he looks up and sees him, sees him looking back. His hair is dark, wet from the shower, strands sticking together, falling over his forehead, dripping onto his bare, broad shoulders.  
  


“Um,” Nick says, eloquent as ever. Clay’s eyes snap to the blank wall on the other side of the room, the frame of the door, anywhere but Nick.

“Um,” Clay echoes, trying desperately to reset his train of thought. “Shit, sorry,” he tries to will himself to close the door, but his eyes keep staring straight up at the popcorn ceiling. “I was just gonna ask—” His brain stalls. He does not remember what he was going to ask. “I was gonna ask if you were planning on streaming later. For, like, dinner plans, and stuff.”

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Nick answers, tone flat. Clay’s face is still hot.

“Okay,” Clay says. He flexes his hand where it still rests on the doorknob.

“Please knock next time,” and his voice cracks on the last vowel. Clay screws his eyes shut and nods.  
  
“Yep. Sorry. Okay, bye.” He steps back out of the room and closes the door. It creaks, and it clicks shut.

So, yeah. It was an accident.

  
——

  
  


Clay kind of assumed something like this would happen eventually. It’s supposedly part of the whole _roommates_ deal, even with the size of their house, their ability to distance themselves from each other. Sleeping under the same roof is a blessing, granted only with the implied sacrifice of boundaries.

It was inevitable, Clay knows. This information doesn’t make him feel any better.

It’s not that anything between them becomes irreparably awkward; they’ve been friends far too long for that. The moment in Nick’s room passes over them like a cool breeze and is gone as quickly as it came. The only problem is that Clay can’t stop thinking about what Nick looks like naked.

Maybe he looked for a second too long, he thinks, and the image of Nick’s chest hair, dark and sprawling, physically burned itself onto his corneas. It’s been days, now, and Clay still sees the long line of his best friend’s dick every time he closes his eyes. He feels weird and on edge most of the time, but it hasn’t become a problem yet.  
  
Emphasis on _yet_. He thinks it might be getting worse.

——

_Nick and Clay are on the living room couch together. It’s overwarm, and they’re pressed close together, chest to chest, and Clay can feel Nick drawing slow, steady breaths, exhaling hot air against his t-shirt._

_The room is quiet, and lit in gold by the early morning light pouring in through the windows. Nick stirs in Clay’s arms and he blinks awake._

_Clay looks down at him and smiles, whispers “good morning,” into the space between them. Nick hums, a rumble from deep in his chest, and Clay shifts, repositioning._

_A couple of things happen at once. Clay’s movement makes him aware of a pressure against his hip, and he registers it as Nick. Or, more specifically, Nick’s dick, tenting his boxers, leaking, leaving a dark wet spot in the fabric. Clay can feel the dampness of it against his skin where his shirt has been pushed up. The friction between them draws a gasp from Nick, rough and punched out._

_Clay still has an arm slung over Nick’s waist. He lets his hand travel lower, coming to rest on the swell of Nick’s ass, fingertips pressing into the softness of him. When he speaks, the low tone of his own voice surprises him. “Want some help with that?”_ _  
_

_Nick seems to take the question as permission. He pushes his hips forward, and Clay feels the hot drag of it, and the wet spot of precum-soaked fabric leaves a cold trail in its wake. Nick whines, and the sound is high and tight-strung. Clay feels his own dick growing in his sweatpants. He slides his hand under the waistband of Nick’s boxers and pushes them down, the elastic stretching around his thighs. The dark head of his dick rests directly against the soft skin of Clay’s stomach._

_Clay brings his free hand between them, wrapping his fingers around Nick’s erection, feeling the weight of it against his palm. He pulls back on his foreskin, runs his thumb over the head and collects the precum gathering there, uses it to slick the warm skin of Nick’s dick. He keeps his fingers in a tight ring, lets Nick fuck into him, uses his grip on his ass to keep them close together, skin to skin in a hot line. Nick reaches under Clay’s shirt, pushes it up further, and uses his blunt nails to claw into his lower back. Clay shudders under the feeling and can’t help but rock his hips into Nick’s thigh. He groans and tightens his fist._

_He starts to move his hand then, and he tries to set a rhythm for them, to give Nick something to follow instead of blindly chasing his release beneath Clay’s fingers. They find it soon enough, and it has Nick’s breath catching in his throat, panting into Clay’s sternum._

_Nick looks up at Clay. His eyes are dark and half-lidded. He parts his lips to speak and Clay can feel Nick’s lips brush against his chin._

_His voice is heavy, and it's rough like creek rocks when it reaches Clay’s ears._

_“Clay,” Nick murmurs. Clay feels a moan rise up from his chest, feels embarrassingly close to finishing in his sweats in simple reaction to his own name, the way it sounds so wrecked, wrought with sleep and arousal. He closes his eyes. He feels Nick flinch against him, and then feels him spill over his fingers and chest, warm and thick, sticking to the inside of Clay’s shirt._

When he opens his eyes, he’s in the dark of his own bedroom, alone, lit only by the blinking, green face of the clock on his night stand. It’s 4:52 in the morning, and Clay can feel his own come cooling on his skin, drying under his fan. His mind grapples with the juxtaposition of what must have been a dream, and the reality of where he is now. He feels an uncontrollable shame rip through him and he rolls over onto his stomach, burying his face in his soft pillow. He suppresses the frustrated urge to scream, like that would do anything to help him at this point. 

He lies there for a minute, wallowing in his own misery, until he’s able to muster up enough self-respect to get up and take a shower. He rolls over and sits up, feels the bedroom carpet under his feet as he stands and heads for the bathroom. He leaves his lights off, maneuvers to the knob of the shower in the dark on muscle memory. He lets the water heat up while he strips out of his clothes, dropping his soiled boxers and t-shirt onto the floor. 

The curtain of warm water and darkness falls on him like a weighted blanket. Clay faces away from the nozzle, letting the droplets hit his shoulders and back, running in streams down his legs. 

He leans back a bit, letting the shower soak his hair. He feels rivulets of water run over his chest, his stomach, wet warmth rinsing away the aftermath of his dream.

Clay stands in the gathering steam and lets his mind wander. He recounts the events of his dream, pulling on threads connected to the sounds of his best friends' quiet moans, the slide of his dick against his skin, the darkness in his eyes when he said Clay’s name—

Clay doesn’t know if he’ll be able to look Nick in the eyes tomorrow. He curses his sleeping mind for putting him in this position. It’s so soon after they’re finally able to inhabit a space together, and he already can’t keep his head under control. 

He lets the water run until it grows cold, no longer bringing him the comfort he had initially been seeking.

Back in his bedroom, with a towel around his waist, he sees that his sheets have not been spared from the blight of his sleep. He pulls the fitted sheet off the corners of his mattress, letting it bunch up in the center, before picking up the bundle of fabric and carrying it over to the door. Running the washing machine this late at night might be a bit suspicious, so he’s probably better off waiting till the next day to do laundry.

A pair of sweatpants catches his eye, resting on the floor near his closet. He steps into them, pulls them up over his hips, letting his towel fall to the floor. He reaches for a hoodie, an old, grey, hand-me-down from an older cousin, and pulls it down from its hanger. When he tugs it over his head, the fabric of the garment sticks to his damp skin, and he can feel his wet hair start to soak the collar of it. 

This is the part where he should go back to sleep, Clay thinks, where he should put fresh sheets on his bed and turn a new leaf, wake up tomorrow and carry on like nothing’s different. Something deep inside of Clay tells him, it won’t be that easy. Whispers, you _want_ things to be different, don’t you? You want a catalyst of change, and you want _him_. You’ve opened the box, now, did you think you would be able to put all this desire back where you found it?

Of course not. Clay wants his best friend, all of him, in every way that matters. He’s past the point of no return. 

Clay stretches out his neck and back a bit, leaning into a twist, feeling his muscles pull and let go of that last bit of lingering sleep. His phone is on his nightstand, charging, so he unplugs it and sits down cross-legged atop his bare mattress, his comforter heaped at the foot of the bed. He opens Twitter on instinct, glancing over the replies under his more recent posts, refreshing his homepage a handful of times. 

After several minutes of blue light, his eyes grow dry and tired, and his limbs become heavy. He lets himself lay down, pulls the comforter up over his shoulders. He makes himself comfortable as best he can, but the uncovered surface of the mattress scratches at his ankles and the backs of his hands. His hair, not yet dried, starts to dampen the pillow. The moisture makes the back of his neck and the tips of his ears cold. 

Despite the questionable sleeping arrangements, Clay’s exhaustion creeps up on him. He stares ahead at pale drywall until his eyes slip shut and his breathing evens out.

His last coherent thought before he rests is one of uninhibited curiosity; Clay wonders if having Nick next to him would be nice, and he wonders if the warmth of proximity would wake whatever dormant thing has been hiding in his chest.

His sleep is restless and he does not dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> kudos and comments are appreciated!!  
> second chapter is on the way so make sure to subscribe so you dont miss it  
> also im on [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/illusorx) :)  
> hope ur dreamnap thursday was wonderful


	2. Chapter 2

Clay sleeps for over eight hours and wakes up in the mid-afternoon.

When he goes downstairs to get something to eat, the house is quiet. There’s an unread text on his phone from Nick, an hour old, _going out to buy some stuff, lmk if you need anything._ Clay reacts with a thumbs up emoji. After his odd night, he is thankful for the solitude; he refills Patches’ water dish on the kitchen counter, runs laundry, and tries not to think about his dream.

He spends his first hour or so awake going through his normal routine of menial house chores, and then he returns upstairs to settle into his office for the day. The natural light from the windows is starting to fade with the afternoon as he boots up Discord, but the glow of his monitors washes over his desk and peripherals. He clicks through unread messages and emails, but he fails, pathetically, to find anything busy enough to occupy his cluttered mind. He ends up opening YouTube, looking at his subscriptions page and pressing play on the first recently uploaded video he sees.

He pulls his knees up to his chest, folding himself into the seat of his chair. His queue of videos starts auto-playing, bright colors and familiar voices flashing across his screen and into his headphones. He almost dozes off there at his desk, so willing to give his attention fully to the content on his screen, so stubbornly not allowing himself to think about whatever his unconscious mind has decided to unearth in him.

Around the time that Patches normally gets hungry, she comes to bother him, letting him know it’s time for her dinner. She mewls at him impatiently, rubs her face onto the corner of the legs of his desk. He stands, puts his computer into rest mode to give it a chance to cool off, and makes his way downstairs into the kitchen.

Patches follows him closely, sticking to his ankles as he walks down the stairs; she noses into the cabinet when Clay opens the airtight container of dry food. He fills her dish and carries it back out to the non-slip mat by the back door where he retrieved it from. Patches is very excited by the idea this whole process, despite the fact that this has been their routine every day for her entire life. Clay crouches down next to her as she eats and scratches at the soft fur behind her ears.

Nick slides open the back door, a shopping bag hanging from the crook of his elbow. Clay is still crouched on the floor next to the cat, but he twists around on his heels to face his friend. Nick responds to the movement, turns to face Clay.

When he looks away from Patches, he’s at eye level with Nick’s crotch. He’s wearing a pair of well-fit, dark-wash jeans, and Clay wants to hold the brassy metal of the zipper between his teeth.

He looks up, and Nick is already looking down at him. Clay blinks, and can’t help but stare at the line of his brow, the curve of his nose and the parted space between his lips. Nick’s expression is unreadable.

In a bright miracle, his self preservation instincts kick in and he wrenches himself up from the floor. He’s taller than Nick by a good bit, and they’re still unfortunately close together. The new position is only better by a small margin; Clay looks down at Nick, who looks back up at him, and his mind races with all the things he could do if they were anyone else, any _thing_ else other than what they are to each other.

He aches, acutely, over the absence of a heat between them that has never been. He takes a wide step back, out of Nick’s space, letting the cool chill blowing in from the open back door ground him.

“What’d you get at the store?” He hopes his voice doesn’t shake.

Nick pulls open his bag and holds it out, so Clay leans over and looks inside. He hears Nick clear his throat.

“Just, uh,” he jostles the bag a bit, shifting around its contents to be more easily visible. “Some manga I’ve been meaning to check out.” Sure enough, there are several paperback books in the plastic bag, with bright covers and black and white spotted pages.

“Oh. Cool,” he says. Nick lets the bag close, then side steps away from the door and walks into the kitchen. Clay watches him and notices the way the denim of his jeans clings to his calves.

“Did you see what Karl said in the group chat?,” Nick says, still facing away from Clay.

Clay rolls his shoulders and tries to relax. “No, I don’t think I’ve checked.”

“He’s gonna stream Jackbox later, if you wanna join,” Nick sets his bags down on the kitchen island. “George and Alex said they’d be there.”

Clay thinks about his friends, their late night calls and jokes. Any other day he would say yes, no questions asked, but right now his world is knocked off its axis. Jokes and quips about relationships between friends are anyone's game, and Clay has never minded them before. But, he thinks, now, if he were to be at the center of any jokes of that nature, he might not be able to take it. He doesn’t know how deep the cracks in his psyche run yet; he can’t cope with peering into them and seeing the vastness of what they hold.

“I’ll probably, like,” Clay reaches for an excuse, an alibi, runs a hand through his hair, “work on some editing that I’ve been meaning to get done. It’s kind of starting to pile up.”

“Oh,” Nick falters halfway through taking off his coat. His forearms are still in the sleeves and the body of it stretches across his lower back. “That’s cool, I’ll let them know.” He finishes taking off his coat and sets it down next to his bags.

Clay feels sick for lying; he knows that if he told something closer to the truth Nick would have understood. If he said he wasn’t feeling great Nick would have empathized. He could probably tell he wasn’t being honest, anyways.

“Okay,” Patches walks from Clay’s shadow to Nick’s. “Thank you.”

“It’s fine.” Nick opens his phone and Clay watches his hands, his thumb scrolling through whatever he’s opened up. “Are you hungry? I was thinking about getting something delivered. We’re not gonna play for a couple hours, so we could watch a movie or something.”

Clay wants to say yes, wants to spend his night on the couch with Nick and watch the first shitty action movie that shows up in his streaming queue. But Clay wants that, and he wants to rest his head on Nick’s thighs, put his hand on his knee, taste their dinner behind his teeth—

“I’m alright,” he says, opens the fridge so he has something to do with his hands. He pulls out a bottle of water, upcaps it and takes a sip so he has something to do with his mouth.

“Are you sure?”

Clay swallows. “I was about to head back upstairs. Thanks, though.” He shoves the water bottle into the large front pocket of his hoodie.

“Alright. Good luck with editing.”

On his way to his computer, Clay makes a pit stop in his bedroom, where he finishes off his water and changes out of his hoodie into a lighter t-shirt. When he settles back down at his desk, he has a direct message from George on Discord.

_**George**  
_ _are you really not playing jackbox or was sap messing with us_

Clay grimaces.

_**Dream**  
_ _i wasnt planning on it  
_ _getting some editing done_

 _ **George**  
_ _that's what sap said  
_ _what are you working on_

Clay tabs out of the messenger and into a random browser window that he had forgotten to close, clicks through a couple of hyperlinks until he can come up with something he thinks George would believe.

 _You trust him,_ something in his chest says, _you could tell him. Do you really want to do this by yourself?_

And the thing is that he _doesn’t_ want to be alone in this; he wants to tell someone. He wants to be told that he’s _okay_ , that this is fine, it’s normal to feel like your hunger is eating you alive, it’ll pass. He wants to believe it, too.

He clicks back into the Discord window. 

_**Dream**  
_ _okay well  
_ _actually  
_ _im just watching youtube  
_ _im not really feeling up for a stream tonight_

He feels lighter, for a moment, and he rides the high of coming clean. George starts typing, then stops, then sends another message. 

_**George**  
_ _oh_

 _ **Dream**  
_ _sorry  
_ _also sapnap does actually think im editing so please dont say anything_

 _ **George**  
i won't  
_ _is there a specific reason or_

 _ **Dream**  
i think  
_ _i dont know if im ready to talk about it yet  
_ _its nothing bad dw_

 _ **George**  
_ _well i'll be here when you want to talk  
_ _ttyl_

 _ **Dream**  
_ _have fun_

Clay feels the guilt of dishonesty loosen in his chest, now that he’s shown a bit of candor with George. He wasn’t lying when he said he didn’t feel ready to talk. He realizes now, though, that he might be ready eventually. It would be healthy to talk about his feelings with someone, and he trusts George implicitly. Clay feels reassured by the knowledge that George knows there is something to talk about in the first place.

For all his hedging about his evening activities, he does, in reality, have videos to edit. He opens up his music streaming application and plays the first playlist on his _discovery_ page, then minimizes the tab and opens his editing software. He loses time to the program, selecting and trimming bits of video, rebalancing audio, and he works until his phone lights up with a notification: _Sapnap is live._

He pushes his headset off the top of his head, lets it rest around his neck, and he runs his fingers through his hair. He gets another notification: _KarlJacobs is live._ He picks his phone up off the desk and taps on Sapnap’s name with his thumb.

The purple loading screen of the Twitch app appears, and then slides into Nick’s _starting soon_ screen. Clay holds his phone in both hands, leans back in his chair and listens to the music playing from the tinny speakers where they’re pressed against his hand. He watches chat fly by, bright text and emojis, until there’s an animated transition and the stream starts in earnest.

It’s comforting to hear his friends voices, to hear them having fun. He hates himself for not being there, even though he could very easily join them. He knows he could, hypothetically, join their voice call, and he wouldn’t even have to play, he could do nothing but talk and they would be _happy_ to have him. 

He doesn’t know if he could bring himself to do it, though, to actually join and form words and interact with his friends when he feels so distant, like his head is in a completely separate world. He feels like his mind is somewhere other than his body. He hears Nick’s giggle on stream through his phone speakers and it strikes the same deep chord of affection, pressing into his ribs, that he felt in the early morning light of his dream.

The stream drags on, cycles through games, and eventually it ends. Clay opens Twitter on his desktop and scrolls, sees no fewer than two of the jokes from the stream on his trending page. He smiles to himself, feels some secondhand form of pride that his friends can engage with so many people. He clicks _like_ on a couple of the funnier tweets he sees.

If he were a more responsible man, he would head to bed soon, in even the vaguest of attempts to keep his sleep schedule close to something that resembles that of a functioning human. But he, unsurprisingly, is not tired. He feels no call to his bed and is perfectly content to stay at his desk. He slides his headphones back on and opens his Minecraft launcher.

Autopilot kicks in, and he clicks through, _Singleplayer, New World, Easy,_ and he drops into a fresh spawn, immediately begins punching a tree. His chat window quickly starts collecting achievements, _Stone Age, Getting an Upgrade._

He doesn’t run a timer, only plays through a save until he gets bored, dies, or gets frustrated by his spawn. By the time he feels he’s played himself out, his Save Select screen is filled with files, none of them beaten, hardly any of them even ending in the Stronghold.

He blinks the dryness from his eyes, scratches at his chin and feels a bit of stubble catch on his nails. He didn’t shave in the shower last night, he remembers, and then didn’t shower when he woke up. He runs the palm of his hand over the coarse hair, and he decides it doesn’t particularly bother him. He can go a few days without shaving, he thinks. It’s not like there’s anyone around to see him besides Nick.

That’s the thing, though, isn’t it? It’s just him and Nick, with this big, echoing house, and every time Clay thinks about the soft curve of Nick’s stomach, he feels an overwhelming surge of desire, affection, a tangle of feelings he can’t bring himself to name yet. He feels so much that he thinks he’s evolving into something other than himself, like he’s sprouting wide, live oak roots into the ground, like there are bees trapped in his expanding lungs.

The clock in the bottom right hand of his screen reads _4:43._ He rubs a finger over the soft skin under his left eye and pushes away the sleep gathering in his lower lash line. He feels torn in half, split between fear and hope at the possibility of having another dream when his head hits his pillow.

He tries to recall high school lessons on sleep hygiene, on how many hours of rest a person should be getting a night, what can happen if someone fails to meet the needs of their body. Maybe fixing his sleep schedule would soft-reset his brain, reattach whatever wires he's managed to disconnect. If he's so miserable, with all his warm wanting staining his hands, if he's so mad at his nights for what they've made him into, he needs to do something about it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 🧍 do you want food  
> 🧍 do you want lamb
> 
> im on [twitter](https://www.twitter.com/illusorx) :)  
> comments/subs/kudos appreciated <3
> 
> thank you to all my friends for listening to me being annoying about this at all hours of the day, and thank you to freddie and mister hozier for the banger title xx


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